Contemporary Art and Culture
At a certain point in one’s life, they stop making new marks or registering new memories. All that remains is a fluid, ever-changing assemblage of the fragments from the past. I would call it no stagnation: it is rather a moderate manner of growing at a different pace.
Continue reading “Wei Jia: The Remembrance of Ink”
Chalet Comellas-Baker uses video, sound, installation, and print to interrogate memory, environment, and place. The Nashville-based artist is inspired by her Spanish, Cuban and American roots and often references Latin American diasporic histories through her personal lens of assimilation. As the co-owner of Unrequited Leisure, she brings a new dynamic of screen-based artwork with critical and topical investigations into Nashville’s growing art scene.
Continue reading “Chalet Comellas-Baker: Interrogating the Performance of Identity”
Todd Bartel came to serious collage because of an assignment he received on the first day of his first class as a freshman at RISD. He recalls the desks were strewn with magazines, and as soon as the course started, Professor Hardu Keck gave the students a prompt, “Create five collages that work with the following sentence: Surrealism is the chance happening of finding an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” Keck did not mention he was quoting Andre Breton, who was quoting Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). He expected his students to work with the strangeness of visual combination and found imagery. That was Todd Bartel’s introduction to Surrealism and chance coupling. He fell in love with collage immediately, coming up with forty-five collages by the first week. One of the key elements that draws him to collage is that it can involve a vast array of analog and digital technologies. “I consider myself an Omni-coupler,” he says.
Continue reading “Todd Bartel: an Omni-coupler”In Dialogue with Henry Klimowicz, founder and director
The Re Institute is an extension of Henry Klimowicz’s studio, a very large 1960s dairy barn outside of Millerton, New York. About 11 years ago sculptor Henry Klimowicz started the gallery as a response to living in the “center of nowhere”, as he puts it. The artist says that the gallery allows him to have extended working relationships with other artists and their work. “I try not to know what a show will be about before it opens and I get to spend the length of the exhibition becoming aware of all of each show’s nuances,” he says about his curatorial process. A normal season at Re Institute includes 4 to 5 shows, which mostly feature 2 to 3 artists showing in the large space upstairs and another person downstairs. “I try to get each artist to have a specific reason for showing in the gallery outside of the possibility of selling work,” he says. This fits his vision of Re Institute as a non-profit institution. It’s important for him that the featured artists will find reasons to use the space uniquely. “There has to be something in the process of showing an artist that brings depth to the artist’s understanding of their own work or the process of exhibiting their work,” he says. These different ways of interacting with each artist have become the most important aspect of the space for him.
Continue reading “Instituting The Re Institute in Millerton”
In her paintings CT based painter Polly Shindler takes a close look at lived-in spaces – interiors with furniture of different periods, textiles with colorful patterns, flooring with different textures. Here spaces are typically void of people and at the same time breath with a sense of human occupancy.
Continue reading “Polly Shindler: Place on Material”In Dialogue with Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen
Common Frequencies brings together a group of Mexican artists whose work explore the intersection of art and science through sound, urban ecology, language, and collective imageries through performance, installation, photography, sound, and drawing. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of free bilingual educational programs that encourage the participation of families. The exhibition runs through October 16th. 2021.
Continue reading “Common Frequencies / Frecuencias Comunes at BioBat Art Space”In Dialogue with Jeanette Fintz
As an abstract artist, Jeanette Fintz has long been interested in the contrast of hard-edged planar geometry (circles, squares, hexagons) existing within an atmospheric field where shapes can float or hold the plane, in a space that appears expansive, transient and increasingly released from the canvas’s edge.Of her newest body of work currently on view through August 1st at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, NY, she explains “these paintings are about giving structure to something intangible, ephemeral, in-flux or conversely, revealing the dissolving of structure that has been.” The following is the artist in conversation with writer and art critic, Carter Ratcliff, to discuss her influences and process.
Continue reading “Jeanette Fintz at Carrie Haddad Gallery”Art Spiel Photo Story
Keren Anavy’s site-specific multi-media installation I Wish I Had a River creates a sense of a painted garden made of paintings, drawings, laser cutouts, sculptures, and video within the confines of the lobby of 10 Times Square. The artist draws on the history, architecture, and ecology associated with her installation site–the center of the bustling garment district; and Art Deco architecture of the building. Moreover, merely 40 years before its completion, New York’s biggest reservoir and supplier of all of Manhattan’s drinking water in the 19th century was decommissioned and torn down one avenue to the East. This relationship between nature, particularly water, functioning as a cultural agent and an important element of consumerism is of particular importance for Anavy, who grew up in a desert region of conflict, where the water resource was scarce. The show is curated by Lauren Powell and runs at ZAZ10TS through August 31, 2021.
Continue reading “I Wish I had a River, The Underground Lobby Garden: Keren Anavy at ZAZ10TS”
One could say that the primary medium of Jorge Otero-Pailos’s work is liquid latex, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his medium is time – or rather, the passage of time made visible. In Distributed Monuments at Sapar Contemporary, Otero-Pailos presents a series of latex casts mounted on canvas from the old U.S. Mint in San Francisco, California and from the pool at Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York. Two monumental sites on opposite coasts come together – one representing the literal creation of wealth, and the other an accumulation of it by an elite family. These latex casts have extracted dust from the sites, which are both in states of preserved ruin, but can be visited by the public.
Continue reading “Jorge Otero-Pailos: Distributed Monuments at Sapar Contemporary”
Multi-media artist and educator Itty Neuhaus has spent a great deal of time observing and interpreting environmental changes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and in Iceland and Greenland. Since 2000, when she took her first trip to Iceland, her drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos have addressed the degradation of glaciers and the nature of icebergs.
Continue reading “Imagining Icebergs”